Singer revisits a dream, with all its pain, at 80

Valentino Perry, 80, sings for fellow residents of Leisure World to keep his voice strong, he said. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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"All I need is one job," Valentino Perry said of pursuing his interrupted dream of becoming a professional singer. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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"I haven't had one singing job in 45 years," said Valentino Perry. But until he finds work, he shares the songs of his youth with fellow residents of Leisure World. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Valentino Perry, 80, says it used to pain him to hear Frank Sinatra sing because Sinatra was living the dream he wanted for himself. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Valentino Perry, 80, says it used to pain him to hear Frank Sinatra sing because Sinatra was living the dream he wanted for himself. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Valentino Perry, 80, shares the songs of his youth with fellow residents of Leisure World. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Valentino Perry, 80, shares the songs of his youth with fellow residents of Leisure World. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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"I haven't had a singing job in 45 years," Valentino Perry said. He still dreams of becoming a professional singer. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Some residents of Leisure World said Valentino Perry was a hit. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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In the early 1950s, Valentino Perry (then known as Gino Nardo) got a chance to meet his idol, Frank Sinatra. Valentino, on a weekend pass from his job in the Navy, waited all day at the Chez Paree nightclub in Chicago. Sinatra's manager took pity on Valentino, bought him a sandwich and, after the show, introduced him to Frank. The pair spent about 15 minutes talking music, a conversation Valentino can recall 60 years later. COURTESY VALENTINO PERRY

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Gino Nardo, circa 1960, made one record during the first stage of his singing career. His label printed fan club photos in preparation for his success. The record sold five copies. COURTESY VALENTINO PERRY

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In 1948, Gino Nardo, looking a bit like a young John Turturro, was ready for stardom as a crooner. He practiced in boxcars and sang in tiny venues available in his small Ohio hometown. Soon, he started a life of regular pilgrimages to New York and Los Angeles in search of a musical career. He soon took on the name Valentino Perry. At 80, his dream is alive. COURTESY VALENTINO PERRY

Valentino Perry, 80, sings for fellow residents of Leisure World to keep his voice strong, he said. ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

For more Valentino Perry

To see and hear Valentino Perry's demo video with almost eight minutes of singing, go to 'Valentino Perry is the Boxcar Singer II' on YouTube. To contact him for singing engagements and other opportunities email him at Nevernever92647@yahoo.com.

As a teenager stuck in a small Ohio town in the 1940s, Valentino Perry caught the crooner's bug something fierce.

Afternoons he'd slip away to the tool shed behind his family's home, a place he decorated with pictures of his heroes, Frank and Tony and Dino, and there he'd sing their hits until his mother called him in for dinner.

Eventually Valentino, then still known by his given name of Gino Nardo, discovered a place he loved to sing even more.

"They had the rail lines, the Allegheny Line, the Pennsylvania Line, that went through town, and I would jump in a boxcar and sing," he says over coffee at his regular hangout, a Carl's Jr. just outside the gates of his home at Leisure World in Seal Beach. "You know why? The acoustics were so good in there.

For 15 years or so, from the 10th grade until he turned 30, Valentino chased his dream. In New York City he lived in Bowery squats, shivering through harsh winters. In Hollywood he plucked watermelons and cantaloupes from the local market's trash bin.

He had some success, met some of his heroes, released one 45 single. But in 1963 he finally put his dream to rest.

"I had no money, nothing going for me," he says. "So I quit. Hung it up."

Or so he thought. Five years ago, Valentino, then 75, saw a sign as he was driving out of Leisure World.

"Karaoke tonight. Singers welcome."

Deep inside, the old dream stirred.

"I thought, 'By gosh, I'm going to check it out.' "

•••

Valentino was born and raised in Warren, Ohio, a steel town roughly halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. His parents were Italian immigrants, his father worked in the mills.

"We were poor, dirt poor," he says. "My father was not a nice, gentle person. He would beat the hell out of me."

Escape came in daydreams fueled by the pop songs he heard on the radio, hits by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin and more. In the 10th grade, he started to sing in public and won a few local talent shows. "And I thought, 'I'm pretty good!'" he says. "Maybe I should make a career of this.

"But my family couldn't afford singing lessons, and I was also in the middle of Ohio."

Valentino, like countless small-town dreamers before him and since, knew he had to get out of his hometown if he were ever going to make it. And so he embarked on a pattern he would follow for the next 15 years, leaving Warren for the bright lights of the big city, traveling to Manhattan or Hollywood, and coming home when his money or spirit ran out.

"I knew I had to get out of that town," he says. "I was dying, emotionally, spiritually."

Valentino got off the bus in Manhattan in the winter of 1952 and asked someone where he could buy a cheap coat to stay warm. That led him to Houston Street, and the Bowery, then a run-down neighborhood full of empty buildings where, if you were crafty and hardy, you could live rent-free.

"I was living in abandoned buildings on Mott Street, Delancey Street," Valentino says. "You crawl in through the crawl space and try to make your way up to the third floor where it was warmer."

Every morning he'd climb back out on the sidewalk, clean himself up and head off to one of the odd jobs he worked or to the Brill Building, the legendary home to songwriters and singers, in an ongoing effort to convince someone to give him a song and a record.

"Nobody cared," he says, a hint of decades-old hurts and self-pity still able to sneak into his voice. "Nobody was interested."

He did occasionally meet some big names, guys like Bobby Darin and Paul Anka, and once, outside the Copacabana Club, pop signer Tony Martin and his wife, actress Cyd Charisse. Always he asked them for advice, and usually they were friendly enough to share a few words of encouragement.

"One time, I'm back in the ghetto, and someone said to me, 'Valentino, why don't you go to California? At least there you can eat fruit. And it's warm.'"

First though, there were many trips back and forth between Ohio and New York City. On one of those, he married and started a family that eventually included three children. He'd work at home to support his family, but eventually take off again for the city and the dream.

"I was so depressed," Valentino says of the years of trying to make in New York City on his own – and of the growing sense the dream wasn't going to happen and chasing it might not be in the best interest of people who depended on him. "I had two children, my wife back in Ohio."

In 1958, Valentino got in his beat-up old '46 Buick and headed west for the first time, sleeping in the car most nights, until he sputtered into Hollywood. When he got to the Pantages Theatre, he says, he pulled over just to stare in awe at the place where the Academy Awards were held.

He took a small flat at the Villa Elaine apartments and learned to check the bins outside the Hollywood Ranch Market every Tuesday when they tossed out the older produce. "If I found a watermelon, I could live on it for three or four days."

As in New York City, he found the places where singers and actors hung out and wriggled his way into brief encounters with the likes of Don Ameche, Ann Miller, singer Tommy Leonetti and, through him, a young Johnny Carson.

"I'd go up and down Sunset Boulevard, dropping into the little clubs," Valentino says. "If they had a piano player, I'd ask them if I could sing a few songs. Most of the time I'd get a free drink; maybe a free meal, but mostly just a drink."

Every time he'd call home to Ohio, though, another reality resurfaced.

"My wife would say, 'Come home and get a job.'

"I'd say, 'I can't do that.' "

•••

At times, there were small grace notes of triumph.

In the 1950s, four Italian guys who owned restaurants in Warren believed in him and gave him money to go back to New York City to study voice. Valentino says he walked into the old Metropolitan Opera building at 40thand Broadway, asked where he could study singing and was directed upstairs to Sydney Rayner, a tenor who'd performed at the Met since the 1930s.

Rayner helped him strengthen his voice and let him watch opera rehearsals downstairs. But Valentino eventually left opera for pop, sometimes sitting in with touring bands in nightspots with names like Moe's Main Street in Cleveland; the Town Casino in Buffalo, N.Y.; and the Stage Door in Pittsburgh.

"I was popular in the area," he says. "For a little time, I had my own radio show in Warren. I'd go into Cleveland and sing in the clubs. But no real money; a few hundred bucks."

In 1960, he landed a deal to release his first and only single.

"Gino Nardo, Warren singer, recently has been signed to a recording contract in New York for the Libon Record Label," reads a brittle yellowed clipping from the Warren Tribune Chronicle dated June 22, 1960." ... Nardo's first major recording will be made in New York sometime in early August and will probably be released in mid-September."

It was a good song called "Here In My Heart." But a few weeks after the release of Valentino's version, other labels came out with versions by Keely Smith and Al Martino. The bigger names killed any chance Valentino had for success.

And so, in 1963, after a second trip to California to try his luck one last time, Valentino called it quits.

He brought his wife and three kids out from Ohio, rented a house in Seal Beach, and tried not to think any longer of what he once thought of day and night. He took on a variety of jobs, scaling fish at the docks on Pierpoint Landing in Long Beach for a few years, styling hair for a nice run after that and, eventually, as an acting teacher and talent manager.

And that was that – until the karaoke sign.

•••

It's a Leisure World Community Sing at Clubhouse 1 and, on this Saturday night, Valentino is the featured performer.

So after amateur time – when Ray sings "You Light Up My Life" and Ethel offers a peppy version of "Consider Yourself" and 50 or so seniors as a group sing numbers like "That's Amore" and "As Time Goes By" — it's Valentino time.

Dressed in a black-on-black-on-black tux, he opens with a joke about his dad calling him a bum. Then, backed by recorded orchestra, Valentino sings Michel LeGrand's "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?"

His next joke – about an Irishman named Muldoon, his dead dog and the parish priest – gets a better laugh. He then sings Tony Bennett's signature song, "I Left My Heart In San Francisco," does a blonde joke and closes with "The Shadow Of Your Smile."

He's been back at it since 2007 when he saw that notice for karaoke. That first night he sang "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter," and though his voice was out of shape, he liked hearing it again. So he started training, going onto his studio in Huntington Beach five mornings a week to sing standards and rebuild his vocal strength.

"I've got a good repertoire. I've got hundreds of songs I can sing."

To expand beyond karaoke and the occasional gig in Leisure World, he tried reaching out to convalescent homes. Who better, he figured, to appreciate the classics.

"I sent hundreds and hundreds of letters to convalescent homes: 'Let me come down and do a show for you, you don't even have to pay me,'" Valentino says. "No response."

He tried to get on the ABC series "Shark Tank" – five times – hoping to convince the show's panel of investors to give him $30,000 to record an album. Rejected. He wrote actors with production companies, guys like Tom Hanks and George Clooney, hoping to interest them in a TV movie about his life: 'Valentino, the Boxcar Singer." Nothing.

Valentino turns 80 next month. His ex-wife Vera lives nearby in Leisure World – they split up 40 years ago but remain friends, and his three kids and grandchildren all live around Orange County. He has no plans to stop trying to find an audience. It's what he does.

"I sing well, but there's not a place to sing," Valentino says. "I would love to go on a show like Jimmy Kimmel or Ellen DeGeneres: 'Here's the boxcar singer, tell us about your life, sing us a few songs!'

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